do you want some bad news about the recession?

It's not nearly as bad as the early-1980s yet-- and a typical recession should last less than a year and then turn around. Then again, maybe this will not be typical-- and will get a whole lot worse than the 1980s.

Here's Dennis Berman in the WSJ on the perils of predicting the macro-economy, especially when things are really weird (hat tip: Linda Christiansen)...

The best that can be said about the economy right now is that it could start looking up by fall. At least that is the view of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who gingerly pegged the downturn ending this year and new growth beginning in 2010. At one point in congressional testimony, he said, "We're not completely in the dark. We know broadly speaking what needs to be done."

Yet it is hard not to be tugged back by history. Read through the accounts of the Great Depression and one is struck by how politicians, policy makers and regular people were caught off guard by the severity of the events that would engulf them.

President Herbert Hoover made his case to the American people in May 1930, saying that "I am convinced we have now passed the worst and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover."

We have learned plenty about combating recession since then. But still our expectations of recovery remain oddly precise and restless. Business television makes the crisis feel like it has the tempo of a videogame. But this isn't Wii Economy. It is plate tectonics

You wouldn't know by listening to the 52 economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal last month. Their consensus view was that the economy would begin growing again by August. Just five of the economists saw gross domestic product falling through all of 2009....

This doesn't mean this current downturn will last as long, or as severely, as the Great Depression. But it is instructive to see how wrong, and how often, so many people were some 75 years ago.

"When you're in the expert business, after a while you realize there are no experts," says Richard Sylla, New York University's Henry Kaufman Professor of The History of Financial Institutions and Markets.

The important thing to know, it seems, is how little we know.